Wild Abandon (8 page)

The communal desktop computer was in the attic and had a button next to it that allowed thirty minutes of access to the Internet at a time. For Albert, this meant that he took his access seriously, going up there with a list:
solar flares (12 mins), galactic equator (10 mins), knife-vest (8 mins)
. Freya’s concern was not just that he believed in the same things as Marina but that her beliefs were gateway beliefs into the vast, unquenchable fruitiness of cyberspace.

All this had come together to convince Freya that she ought to remove Albert from the community for a time.
That she also needed a break from Don was just a lucky symmetry. The simplest and cheapest solution was to go to the roundhouse, a twenty-minute walk away through the woods; not much of a holiday destination, but it would give him (them) a little breathing space. The roundhouse was made of cob, which was, put simply, mud. It had originally been built as an educational tool: a group of visiting undergraduates on a Sustainable Built Environment degree had assembled it over four days, spent two nights in it, then tried to take it apart again. It was a testament to the hardiness of cob housing that destroying it was more hassle than building it; the students gave up, and left the structure mostly intact. After that it became the community’s overflow sleeping area, though it had not been used in a long time.

It didn’t seem like a big thing to be asking Don: a fortnight’s time-out, for her and for Albert. A month maybe. After all, they both agreed that something needed to be done. Yet she found herself unable to broach the subject. All of which went some way to explain why, this morning, after a night of maddening sleeplessness, she had decided it would be a good idea to type him a letter about it. She got as far as
Dear Don
, then her daughter came in, and that was the point that Freya realized she was behaving like an unstable, sleepless person, not a wife communicating to her husband about a shared concern.

Freya let her poetry book drop to the duvet. Her reading glasses fell off her nose and hung round her neck. She turned to her husband, but he started speaking before she could.

“I told Patrick he needs to finally forget Janet,” Don said. “Don’t be the victim. Stop moping. Quit the demon weed.
He was still puffing on that pipe—some potent concoction.” There was a tone in his voice, and an angle of his chin in delivery, that let her know he was saying something he’d already practiced in the well-attended auditorium of his mind. He spoke up toward the curtain rail. Sometimes he would premiere a statement with Freya, then over the next few days she would hear him say the same thing to other communards, perhaps editing a word or two, depending on the audience. A good strong utterance might see nine or ten outings before being archived. “You live in a community with a constant flow of young, attractive left-leaning men and women. Get stuck in, Pat, I said. Sixty’s not too old. All these tremendous women spending time here, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident. Get out there. It feels good to make other people feel good. Be active. Sweat out your problems. Let’s reanchor the fences. But I think he’s worried about dislocating his shoulder. It’s his
mind
dislocating that I’m worried about.”

“Don.”

He turned to look at her. He had the sheen of an uncollected sneeze in his mustache hair. He saw something in her expression and closed his book, let it drop to the duvet, and patted the back cover. “Yes,” he said.

“I’m worried about Albert. I don’t think it’s good for him to be spending so much time with Marina.”

“I’m with you, Frey. You know that.”

“I was thinking he and I could go to the roundhouse for a while. A fortnight, maybe. A kind of holiday.”

Don blinked twice. She felt the mattress shift as he sat more upright. “But the roundhouse is half-built.”

“I thought that could be part of it. I’ll show him how to finish the cobbing. It’ll be educational.”

He looked around the room. “When did you think of this?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

“You’re saying you want to move out of the house, you and Albert?” The volume of his voice spiked.

“I thought we could talk about it.”

“All this because of Marina? Let’s not go crazy. Why doesn’t one of us just speak to Albert? Education, not prohibition, we could”—she saw the hairs on his neck ripple as his Adam’s apple bounced—“dig out the Personal Instrument?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I honestly think it might help.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Why are you being like this?”

They stayed in silence for a while. The Personal Instrument was a learning tool that, according to her husband, helped “encourage young people to make active choices between right and wrong.” He had built it himself. Every young person, shortly after their thirteenth birthday, got to wander the farm wearing the device. Don liked to say the experience was equivalent to the vision quest in Native American cultures. It was frightening to glimpse the gap between Don as he viewed himself, and the reality. She pulled back her side of the duvet and swung her legs out. He watched her get dressed and take a blanket out of the bottom drawer of the dresser. He listened to her go down the corridor and knock on their daughter’s door.

• • •

Patrick was standing in the middle of the geodesic dome in shapeless boxer shorts, holding a table leg with both hands, in a baseball stance.

It had been little comfort for him to realize that the growling animal noise, which had got so loud that he felt vibrations in the soft flesh along his jawline, was not the sound of a beast, awoken after thousands of years, come to wreak vengeance on this earth, but a Saab Avail, announcing Janet’s boyfriend’s exit, presumably with her purring in the passenger seat. After that, when he felt the second half of the lassi start working, he climbed up the wooden staircase into bed and, lying beneath two duvets and a blanket, started to feel nervous. Soon nervousness became twitching paranoia and, not long after that, twitching paranoia blossomed into a higher state of pure understanding: his fellow communards were not his friends; they were planning his removal.

It would be so easy. There were no locks on the doors. So Patrick got out of bed, took the loose leg off the table, and barred the double doors by feeding it through the two coat hooks. He tried to go to sleep again. It didn’t work. He listened to the ash tree outside groaning like a man slowly dying. He heard the distant sound of laughter that might well have come after a vicious but finely judged joke regarding his personal odor. He heard an unknown dog barking with a hoarse mindlessness, starved and bloodthirsty. He got out of bed again, took the table leg off the door, and stood with it in his hands like a bat, which is where he was now, waiting for them to burst in.

Listening to the noises outside his room, Patrick constructed a narrative: for years, Don had been looking for a
way to get rid of him, had been telling everyone about his creepy, masturbatory, weirdo-in-the-dome obsession with Janet. Don had been saying that Patrick was a hermit, a recluse. He’d told them he was no longer useful, he was spent, a drain on resources, but by dint of Patrick’s financial liquidity, he was difficult to expel.

First, they had paid off his dealer, Karl Orland, then they had waited for Patrick’s stash to run dry. Second, they had made bets on how long it would be before his mental collapse. Third, at a secret brunch-time meeting, they had planned in exquisite detail his final hours, discussing every contingency: disposal, legal matters, a bonfire of his guitars, and through their commitment to putting Patrick in the ground there would bloom a new communal solidarity, as though he were the finest possible compost.

Fourth, this very afternoon, when Patrick had taken the car without asking, and hadn’t helped with the cloches, and hadn’t returned the car key, they all knew he was going to the bus bay outside Shepherd’s, so they made the decision to act. Later, when one of their spies came past and said, “Someone’s having a party,” she reported back that he was brewing a strong dose and would shortly enter a state of reduced motor function.

Albert—who was good at climbing—was in the ash tree above the geodesic dome, with his hands on a high branch and his feet on a lower one, stretching and bending his legs, making the tree creak loudly, knowing the fearful sleeplessness this would bestow.

Marina had brought out her four-octave Korg keyboard
with the surround-sound speakers and set them up in a circle around the dome. With total disregard for electricity consumption, she was using “Set 665: Unnerving Sound Effects,” working “Fearful Wind” with one hand and with the other, “Laughter at Your Expense,” and occasionally “Growling Dog in Blood Lust.”

This was all in aid of getting Patrick into a state of terrified paralysis so that when Arlo, Marina, Freya, Don, and a number of masked, ambitious wwoofers who wanted to show their commitment to the community came into his room, chanting his name and wearing robes with deep hoods, to take him at last, Patrick would stay still, shaking in his bed and, given his family history, in addition to previous addictions, perhaps suffer a fatal embolism. If his heart held they would simply lower the rainbow-colored pillow onto his face, pin his arms and legs down, and continue chanting until his body stopped moving. Then they’d lay his arms across his chest in an X and in the morning, they would say: “So peaceful, he must have known it was his time.”

They would dispose of his body in the compost, and he would be replaced, for there were tens and tens of people who’d take his position, and they were younger and supple and spoke more than one language.

His only option was action. He could not stand still waiting for them. He would have to duck through the low double doors, step out of the porch and into the moonlight, swinging his blunt implement, smashing the keyboard first, which was something he’d been wanting to do anyway, then targeting Freya, who was more dangerous than her husband, then
cracking Arlo’s skull like the top of an egg, on and on, one after the other, notches on the table leg, though even in Patrick’s wildest delusions, Kate was not involved.

Last of all would be Don. Patrick would drag his unconscious body to the deep part of the river, where he would wait for him to wake up, then, as though absolving himself of every wrong, washing away every bitterness, skimming off his misery, Patrick would baptize Don, again and again, under many different names.

Breathing hard through his mouth, Patrick kicked out the double doors. As he stepped outside into moonlight, the cold landed the first punch, smacking him in the nose. He couldn’t see the keyboard. He couldn’t see the hooded figures. There was a bonfire smell. The market garden was still covered with a patchwork of tarps, rugs.

As he stepped along the slate path that led toward the yard, the cold ran up through his feet, his ankles, rattled past his knees, and settled in his stomach. He tried to be positive: in just his underwear, he would be that much more nimble while they, in their ungainly robes, would be like sacks of steak to tenderize. He thought of punching Don again, this time with the ring that was a present from Janet, and leaving a cattle brand on his temple. He looked back at the dome, checked the roof. Nothing. He looked up into the bare ash tree; it creaked of its own accord. But then, at last, there was laughter. A knowing, hollow laugh.

As he made his way across the yard, the sharp gravel made him wince. Keeping close to the south wall of the big house, he stayed out of the patches of moonlight. He was shivering. Mud clotted the thick hairs on his calves. As he walked down
the stepped wood-chip path, he saw there were some people around a small fire at the bottom of the garden, which was not unusual for a Friday night.

His mind swiftly reordered the previously stated narrative to make sense of the new information. They would tell him he was paranoid. They would put a flammable blanket round him. They would ask him whether he should consider laying off the green lassis. Then they would tip him on the fire and beat him, burn him, dance, and raise a glass to his great sacrifice and, by morning, his bones would be nothing more than ash, sprinkled over the beetroot patch and returned to the earth.

Who will come looking for me?

Nobody. They’ll keep signing for your pension, so that even after your death, you will still fund the community.

It was Janet, Freya, and Kate seated on three kitchen chairs, with Freya in the middle and one big blanket around all their shoulders, each with a mug. They were leaning into one another. There was a bladder of wine at their feet. The reason Janet had sent her boyfriend away, Patrick now decided, was that she didn’t want him to witness this ruthless act of housekeeping.

He could hear them as he got close.

“… you haven’t met him because he’s a doofus,” Kate said.

“You call your boyfriend a doofus?” Janet said. She held her mug in both hands, keeping it close to her mouth as though it were tea. She had her hair tied back but a sweep of fringe across her forehead.

“You wouldn’t like him,” Kate said.

“I would,” Freya said. “I’m into doofuses. Is he ugly? I like ugly men.”

Janet picked up the foil bag and, squeezing one end, topped off their mugs. Her face was puffy. She had two red wine stains, shaped like devil horns, at the corners of her mouth.

“He’s not ugly,” Kate said.

“I knew it. He’s beautiful,” Janet said. “You have to let us meet him.”

“Never going to happen.”

Freya said: “I’ll put on some makeup and pretend not to be your mother.”

“I don’t want to see that.”

“Patrick?” Janet said.

He was standing on the other side of the fire, the table leg down at his side, and he was shivering so fast he could have turned to gas. In the firelight they saw the skin on his shoulders, sun-aged and slack. His chest hair was not at all dense, but it was evenly spread.

“Come on then,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“Pat, what’s happened?” Freya said. “You must be freezing.”

They stood up together, the blanket falling from their shoulders.